About

Diango Hernández was born in 1970 in Sancti Spíritus, Cuba. He currently lives and works between Düsseldorf and Havana.

His work has been included in many group shows in international institutions such as MOMA in New York and the Hayward Gallery in London, and has been presented at the 2005 Venice Biennale, the 2006 Biennales in São Paulo and Sydney and the 2010 Liverpool Biennial.

In recent years, Hernández’s work has focused on translating memories and texts into painterly waves to transform what appears as fixed and known into mutable scenes. Naturally suggesting a constant flow, the waves encourage a mobile reading of texts and mempories, seeking to bring new meanings to the surface. This group of seven paintings, specifically made for ARCO 2017 over the last year, derives from excerpts of “Leyes del Gobierno Provisional de la Revolución” (“Laws of the Provisional Government of the Revolution”), a pamphlet published in Havana in 1959. This small document, though innocent in appearance, exposed the most radical and revolutionary directives that would come to define the social projects of Revolutionary Cuba. Placing a “new man” at the center of its new social idea, the pamphlet described the type of new nation that was to be born. Consisting mostly of portraits, Hernández’s paintings address the birth of this new man and nation. El Cañero, for instance, refers to a sugar cane plantation worker, a figure that would become the central focus and, ultimately, the victim of the Cuban pro-sugar economic strategy in the 1960s. But while El Cañero refers explicitly to Cuban society, most of Hernández’s paintings use autobiographical references to get to the heart of the artist’s interest: the coalescence of personal and collective memory to create “poetic truths.” Since the beginning of the revolution in Cuba, years have been given names rather than numbers. While the first year, 1959, was called “el Año de la Liberación” (the Year of the Liberation), 1960 was called “el Año de la Reforma Agraria” (the Year of Agricultural Reform) and 1963, “el Año de la Organización” (the Year of Organization). Repeated day after day, these names acted as daily reminders of what the country and its citizens were to achieve throughout the year. As a result, the concept of a “year” shifted from one that was closely related to time to one based on broad, collective, and quasi-spiritual productive goals. Interested in questions of authorship, power, and interpretation inherent to the act of naming years, Hernández developed a translation of the first five years of the revolution into bronze waves, resulting in Los cinco primeros años, a series of five sculptures mounted atop plywood and concrete structures.